SOURCE: McGraw, Erin. “Larger Concerns.” Georgia Review 51, no. 4 (winter 1997): 782-92.

In the following excerpt, McGraw lauds Bear and His Daughter, contending that Stone writes concisely and powerfully in stories containing familiar themes from his novels such as morality and motivation.

Successful fiction achieves several balancing acts, including the balance of action against reflection, desire against restraint, simplicity against complexity. The last of these may be the trickiest, since it's easy for a writer who is working to shape and streamline a story to streamline the story's implications, too, and thereby to exclude larger issues of philosophical or moral concern. So, even while simplifying the story's action, a good writer must also complicate the characters' motives—aims often difficult to balance and sustain.

Few writers in this century have been more aware than was Flannery O'Connor of the need to meet these opposing demands, and few have worked so...